Sophinisba Solis

My last books post was just over six months ago ahh! I think I could manage it more often if I didn't try to do it on a Wednesday but I have that Dreamwidth nostalgia idk. But in that post I dared to dream that I would finish 50 books in 2021 and that did happen, I got to 54!

So then I set my goal for 2022 at 50 again but that's looking unlikely. I finished my 8th book of the year today, so I'm about on track for my normal total around 30.

Some books I especially enjoyed since my last books post were
Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
Catfishing on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer

( Uzodinme Iweala, Angie Kim, Kathryn Schulz, etc )

Hello, Dreamwidth, it's been three weeks since my last books post and I have finished four more books, bringing me up to 20 for the year. Whoo! One of those books was for work but I will tell you about the other three: Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha, The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon, and How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith.

( books! )

I have again gone seven weeks since my last book post but am managing to post on a Wednesday! I have finished just three books since then, one I won't talk about and also Educated by Tara Westover which was good and Pachinko by Min Jin Lee which was GREAT.

Books I have read parts of but may not finish include Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford, The Mothers by Brit Bennett, and an audiobook of Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison.

And now, a cut tag: ( Read more... )

It's a Wednesday and I've been less busy at work this past week! I have been reading books!

( Read more... )

I also checked out but haven't yet started reading Crooked Hallelujah by the Cherokee writer Kelli Jo Ford, which I found out about through the delightful NPR Book Concierge, which came out yesterday.

I made a post about reading and TV about two weeks ago so this is sort of an update to the books part, and maybe I'll write more about TV and movies another time.

( books by Jesmyn Ward, Colson Whitehead, Michelle Obama, Curtis Sittenfeld )

Hello! I'm very tired but I've remembered that I've been meaning to post about reading on a Wednesday. Omg I used to do that like every week? Or most weeks?? And haven't done so since February 2014???

What I've read
In the first five months of 2019 I read 15 books for work plus these twelve for fun, my favorites starred:
Rumaan Alam, That Kind of Mother
Cristina Henríquez, The Book of Unknown Americans
Barbara Kingsolver, Unsheltered
Tana French, The Secret Place
Kiese Laymon, Long Division
Heather Havrilesky, Ask Polly’s Guide to Your Next Crisis (this one was mostly a waste of time but on the bright side not very much time)
Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn
Erika L. Sánchez, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter*
Tana French, The Witch Elm** (omg)
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties*
Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere*
Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library

Then Endgame happened an in the last five months I've read one short novel for work and, like, a lot of fanfiction about Tony Stark. /o\

What I'm reading
A couple days ago I checked out the novel Severance by Ling Ma from the library. I had not heard of it before but it came up on the list of relatively popular but available titles on Overdrive. I'm a little less than halfway through and I'm digging it. It's about a young woman who's one of a handful of people to survive a plague. I enjoy a good near-future apocalypse/dystopia and I also like the chapters that talk about her life before the plague, stuff about being a twenty-something in New York, about being a Chinese-American who travels to China on business, just stuff that's different from my experience but resonant and well written. I am anxious about where the post-plague plot will go.

What I'll read next
I actually forgot that I'd checked out Severance and I also checked out The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell on Overdrive. Maybe I will read that next. It looks to be about a bunch of generations of a family in Zambia and I wonder if it will be anything like Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, which I read a few years ago and loved.

ETA Also a lot of people on Twitter have been talking about Gideon the Ninth and I requested it from the library so I might get it that way eventually, or maybe give in and buy it.

Here is another weekend without a fanworks rec post from me, but also here are two books I've recently enjoyed:

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is a novel that takes place mostly some years after a flu pandemic wipes out most of the human race and civilization. Most people in North American survive in tiny little towns built up in places where there used to be businesses, and there's a group of actors and musicians that travels from town to town. There are also parts that take place before and during the pandemic but the focus is mostly on human relationships rather than science or illness or worldbuilding. I loved this book a lot!

I heard about The Turner House by Angela Flournoy just recently when it was nominated for a National Book Award. It's about a large black family in Detroit and takes place mostly in 2008 when they find out they owe more on their old house than it's worth, but also some in the 1940s when the father first moved Up North from Arkansas, plus some memories in between. Again, it's not heavy on plot so much as what the people in this family mean to each other, and they all felt so real and human. It reminded me a little of the TV show Treme with its large cast of characters who are all flawed but basically decent people trying to get by. Also an interesting and sad look at changes in some of Detroit's neighborhoods over the decades that made me want to learn more. (I might try reading The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas Sugrue the next time I feel like reading a nonfiction book not for work.

In between Station Eleven and The Turner House I read another novel that I liked less, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. I think I saw chaila say a while back that anything the publishers try to sell as "the next Gone Girl" will inevitably turn out to be disappointing and that's how this was for me, though it definitely kept me turning the pages. Nevertheless the next book I'm looking forward to reading is Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff, which is also being marketed that way (and also a finalist for a National Book Award).

veleda_k asked me to talk about a book that influence me. I'm finding this hard! I can think of a lot of books that made a big impression on me at the time that I read them but seeing the influence later is harder.

( books )

Boo Sunday afternoon! As I explained the other day, Sunday afternoons and evenings are when I stress and get sad about not being ready for Monday. Something I forgot to say in that post is that B watches football on Sunday afternoons and evenings and yells at the TV, and it makes Sundays worse for me.

Oh well, feels good to get caught up on a meme at least!

Happy birthday, baranduin! I miss you and hope you are having a good day. Thank you for making this icon and for being so smart and honest and kind.

I stopped watching House about a year and a half ago, I think, but I did use to like the show a lot and I'm interested in watching the finale. Can anybody tell me whether it stands up okay on its own or how many episodes before the end they'd recommend watching? I'd go for three or four of them but probably not the whole season.

( links: finales discussions and podcasts )

I have written most of a personal update type post. Maybe I will finish that sometime. Things are going well though!

Also I have started watching Mad Men (all four seasons available on Netflix streaming) and I love it.

Now here is that NPR SF/F book meme! This is a list of Top 100 Science-Fiction and Fantasy Books as voted on by more than 60,000 people at npr.org. For the meme, strong the ones you've read, emphasis the ones you intend to read, underline the ones you've read part of, and strike the ones you never intend to read. (I'm not really bothering with the strike because I don't have strong feelings about most of the ones I haven't read, but I probably will not read them.)

( a bunch of books mostly by white guys! )

I've been enjoying reading this meme and reactions to it on other people's journals and I liked Glen Weldon's explanation/commentary. (Glen is part of the NPR Pop Culture Happy Hour so it is is fun to imagine it in his voice - especially the line "Be a dude.") eruthros is starting up a top 100 speculative fiction works as chosen by people in fandom list, now in the nominations stage.